Yet another AI video startup has pulled in an eye-watering sum and jumped into the unicorn club. PixVerse, a Singapore-based company, attracted 439 million dollars (around 400 million euros) in an extension of its funding round, and its valuation now tops two billion dollars. For a firm founded only in 2023, that is a leap in just two years that shows how much money is sloshing around the moment someone says „artificial intelligence" and „video".

Behind PixVerse stand Wang Changhu, a former computer-vision engineer at ByteDance (the company behind TikTok), and Jayden Xie, who comes from the world of investing. This round pulled in heavyweight names too - Alibaba, Mirae Asset and a string of Asian funds. Money, then, is not the problem.

What does PixVerse offer? Tools that turn text or an image into video at resolutions up to 4K, with sound, for around 4.80 dollars a minute. The company boasts 150 million registered users and 15 million active each month - numbers that sound impressive until you remember that „registered" does not mean „paying". How many of those millions actually pay, the company will not say.

And here comes the most telling remark. Asked what sets them apart from the competition, Xie said: „The key difference is not in the data, but in how you label it, because data is everywhere." An honest admission in an industry where everyone claims to have some secret formula - in fact, the secret is that there is no big secret. Anyone with enough money and engineers can build similar tools, and the difference comes down to the details and to who wins over the user first. The question left hanging in the air: how many of these two-billion-dollar valuations will survive when the music stops?